The Washington Post reports Hopkins' total includes biomedical research at its medical center in Baltimore, as well as $1.1 billion spent at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County.

The National Science Foundation ranked the University of Michigan, which spent $1.3 billion, second.

Other schools in the Mid-Atlantic region that placed in the top 200 in spending are the University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland, Baltimore; George Washington University in Washington; Georgetown University in Washington; the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md.; George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.